Friday, 15 August 2014

Jolla phone 3rd party The Other Half - community projects

Community built Jolla accessories

UPDATE, August 15, 2014: Kimmo Lindholm has started his next project: FM TOH, an FM Radio receiver. See the video and read about the first steps.

Jolla's customers have been looking forward for smart covers, called The Other Half by Jolla, including some hardware as Jolla phone enables these via its I2C connection port. So far Jolla has been selling only The Other Half models capable of changing the phone's ambience, communicating with the phone via NFC

Share this post

This project is in the beginning, Kimmo is currently fitting a piece of wire inside the TOH testing if it's enough as an antenna. The TOH is currently equipped with it's own headphone jack making Jolla work more as a remote control for an independent FM radio device inside The Other Half, but Kimmo is working for audio connection via I2C to enable Jolla phone speakers, and after this he's planning on adding a FM transmitter along. Let's see what we're going to see with this!

So far Kimmo has succeeded with an Infrared thermal imager TOH combined to Jolla's camera image (TOHIR), E-ink display as big as fits to the cover (TOHEINK) and the most advanced one, TOHOLED currently already in revision 6. The TOHOLED described below is from earlier stage:

1. TOHOLED, The Other Half for Jolla phone equipped with OLED display

Circuit for Jolla's OLED The Other Half, TOHOLED was designed and prototype was manufactured by Kimmo Lindholm. Devaamo manufactured 100 of these circuits and shared them for free for hardware developers at Jolla Hack Day.

Above: Prototype by KimmoBelow: Devaamo's serieImage: Review Jolla

You can read more about the TOHOLED project at this thread (developer forum), maybe inquire your own too for 100 Euros. Not much for something quite exclusive, but now there might be just a few (or none) left to order.

Following video is from the end of January. The project has been going on after Jolla introduced this project at Mobile World Congress 2014 (Barcelona, Spain).

2. PROTOTYPE OTHER HALF KEYBOARD DEMO March 13, 2014 by JollaTides

We recently got wind of more developments of the slide-out keyboard other half project that has been quietly simmering away over the past few months… the good news is that it looks to be nearing completion!

The keyboard OH was demoed at MWC 2014 in the Jolla stall and proves that this proof of concept is now beyond a mere dream and is actually on the verge of being realised. We read the news via the Jolla Mobile facebook page and thank Ash from Mobile Linux News for sharing the video with all of us and especially to dirkvl at maemo for his hard work on the proof of concept!

The chassis of the keyboard OH seems to be 3D printable according to the video and the keyboard is designed to slide out and can also be angled according to your preference.

If you would like to get one of these cool OH keyboards early, dirkvl was running a pre-order with only a limited run at 100 Euros per piece and you would need to contact him via maemo and read through this threadBig respect to the inspiring Jolla community as always for pushing forward with these awesome projects!